From a very young age, Warhol displayed a talent for the arts that was recognized by his family and teachers. In Pittsburgh, he attended the Holmes School, whose curriculum drew upon the early twentieth-century progressive education movement and included regular art courses. As the family could often not afford toys or even a radio for many years, Julia Warhola kept her kids entertained through art. After a serious bout of rheumatic fever at age eight left him bedridden for a few weeks followed by complications that persisted for years, Warhol spent much more of his life indoors, encouraged by his mother not to be too active. To keep himself occupied, he dove into his creative pursuits, drawing in coloring books and copying comics, a thread that can be traced to his first Pop artworks. It was at this time that he also began to use the family’s camera, developing photos in a darkroom his brothers built for him in the basement. He was also an ardent fan of the movies. Warhol would earn money for movie tickets by drawing portraits of his neighbors, and when he couldn’t do that, he would sneak in. Later on, Julia would buy her son a home movie projector, a relatively new technology at the time and a luxury for the family. Ultimately, his talent got him admitted to art courses at the Carnegie Institute. The Institute also included a number of museums and cultural institutions, which exposed Warhol to a range of classical art. These galleries were supplemented by touring exhibitions, from Renaissance masters to Picasso, one of Warhol’s favorite artists.

In his teens, Warhol attended Schenley High, where his artistic talents only became more apparent. In his personal life, he was something of an outcast, isolated from his peers due to his effeminate behavior. He stuck to a few close friends, typically other outcasts. This was also the period when he began to develop serious anxiety over his complexion, and an obsession with his bad skin would plague him throughout his life. In high school, he was an honor student and got above-average grades, though he was not known for being an especially enthusiastic scholar. Under a program that accelerated graduation for promising students so that they might attend some college before going to fight in World War II, Warhol graduated high school at sixteen. He applied to a program at the Carnegie Institute of Technology, the first in his family to attend college. Warhol majored in pictorial design, a newly retooled concentration that collapsed the distinction between fine and applied arts in the tradition of the Bauhaus. One course that left an impression on the budding artist was “Arts and Civilization,” taught by Balcolm Greene, which looked at the social function and value of art across time and geography. It was an early dose of postmodernism in a time when modernism was still king. All was not smooth sailing, however. Warhol nearly flunked out after his freshman year, underperforming in the school’s mandatory humanities courses and being criticized by several professors for his poor realistic drawing skills. He would have to take a makeup class and produce more artworks over the summer, which would determine whether he could stay at the academy. His drawings of his brother’s produce truck ultimately saved his academic prospects, even earning him a small prize.

Warhol' s father was largely absent for much of his early life. As a laborer, he often spent weeks away from the family on construction sites across the country. Instead, Warhol' s mother Julia, née Zavacky, was the defining parental presence in his life. Warhol was deeply attached to his mother from a young age. She was also an indispensable part of his artistic upbringing. As a young woman in Europe, she was known for being bold and brilliant, taking on roles in her village typically reserved for men, like ornamental house painting and singing in the church. By all accounts she reveled in her aesthetic eccentricities—a trait she surely passed onto her son. And she continued to use her artistic abilities in the US. To earn extra income for the family, she would make metal flowers out of cans of peaches, which she would sell door to door. Some scholars have even noted that there might be a link between these early, amateur artworks and Warhol’s Campbell Soup can paintings. She encouraged Warhol’s early love of art, spending the family' s modest means on drawing materials for the young artist. Not long after Warhol moved to New York in 1949, Julia would join him there, moving in and living with him almost until her death in 1972. In this time, he would work with Julia as a collaborator, using her florid calligraphy for his commercial illustrations and once even casting her to star in one of his films.

One lesser-known period in the life of Andy Warhol is his work in commercial illustration in the 1950s. Warhol first arrived in New York in 1949 with two hundred dollars to his name. He immediately set out with a list of names of art directors, pitching his portfolio around town. His style attracted the attention of the art director of Glamour magazine, and he quickly attained his first commission. From there, the jobs came in quickly. The advertising industry was just realizing the power of bold images, paving the way for a new generation of illustrators. Warhol’s work ethic and dramatic, often campy style immediately set him apart from his peers. He lined up a series of commissions: album covers for Columbia Records, illustrations for Harper’s Magazine, and ads for CBS. Perhaps most famous is his work for the renowned I. Miller shoe company beginning in 1955. Warhol’s highly camp, unabashedly feminine illustrative technique paired well with the company’s new high-concept advertising strategy. These ads ran in the New York Times, bringing the artist more mainstream fame on top of the financial windfall. He became known as “the Leonardo da Vinci of the shoe trade” and went on to make shoe illustrations for several years. Warhol was assisted in his commercial illustrations by his blotted line technique, a rudimentary printing method of pressing one sheet of paper against another, transferring ink. Apart from producing striking, broken outlines, it allowed the artist to create several variations in a short amount of time. One can also trace the origins of Warhol’s silkscreens and other mechanical techniques to this process. Starting in the 1950s, Warhol made a series of window displays for the department store Bonwit Teller. By the early 1960s, these displays included highly stylized prop paintings of enlarged comic frames and commercial advertisements—Andy Warhol’s very first Pop paintings, though not presented as fine art.

In 1964, after moving to the renowned Silver Factory on 47th Street, Warhol’s studio became a major hotspot of the New York cultural landscape. Warhol devised an ingenious way to document the many figures who populated and visited the Factory: the Screen Test films. The very first Screen Test was of studio assistant Gerard Malanga, who as an aspiring poet, wanted to use a series of film frames as an author photo. After shooting Malanga sitting in front of the camera, Warhol found the pared-back stillness of the resulting film to be compelling.

The format was deliberately simple. Each sitter was asked to stare at a stationary Bolex trained on their head for two minutes and forty-five seconds, moving as little as possible. They were often left alone though, and some of Warhol’s subjects chose to be more active. Others broke down laughing, and famously the poet Ann Buchanan found it so difficult to keep her eyes open that tears began rolling down her cheeks. These films were then slowed down to four minutes each, adding a layer of temporal distortion that expands every minute gesture. The resulting viewing experience is uncanny, variously intimate and uncomfortable as the audience is asked to gaze into the eyes of another for an extended stretch of time. In total, Warhol shot nearly 500 of these Screen Tests.

In October 1982, the art collector and socialite Alfred Siu invited Warhol to visit Hong Kong and attend the opening of his new club. They would also take a two-day side trip to Beijing. The dealer Jeffrey Deitch was advising Siu on his art purchases, including works by Warhol, and it was he who made the introduction. Warhol, his friend and photographer Christopher Makos, and the artist’s entourage spent the opening mingling with the cultural elite of Hong Kong. Indeed, Warhol’s visit to Hong Kong also had a more commercial motive. Warhol hoped that Siu might introduce the artist to the city’s rich and famous so that they might commission portraits. He left disappointed, as many of the socialites he met demurred at the prospect of openly commissioning a portraits in the company of their friends and peers. His efforts ultimately paid off though, as many later would visit New York and seek out his services there. After a few days in Hong Kong, the group set off for Beijing. Warhol was not awed by the city, finding Beijing in 1982 to be a bit sleepy for his taste. They spent their days visiting tourist sites, such as the Forbidden City, the Great Wall, and various markets, with Warhol snapping photographs all throughout. The artist was not an avid sightseer though. Instead, he was more interested in experiencing the city’s nightlife, looking for bars and clubs. He was disappointed that all they could find were a few pool bars. Notably, he did have a formal visit to an art academy, possibly the old campus of the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Wangfujing, where he was received by a professor of traditional art.

The original Silver Factory, also known simply as the Factory, was located on the fourth floor of 231 East 47th Street in Midtown Manhattan. Warhol’s previous studio was put up for sale in late 1963, and the artist’s bid was too low. Warhol and his assistant Gerard Malanga spent weeks traversing the city looking for a replacement. Warhol found the large, industrial space in January 1964, and it was in terrible shape. There were no lights, the walls were peeling, and there were gaps in the concrete floors. Moreover, while Midtown is now a bustling business hub, in the 1960s it was a cultural desert, far removed from the arts scene downtown. But Warhol saw promise in the space, and he began converting it into an artistic powerhouse that could also stand as a landmark attraction unto itself. The titular silver was Warhol’s solution to the decrepit architecture. In 1963, Warhol attended a haircutting party hosted by soon-to-be-Superstar Billy Name. Name’s apartment was entirely silver. From the walls and ceiling to the bathtub and silverware, everything was either covered in foil or spray painted. Warhol invited Name to give the same treatment to his new studio, and while reluctant at first, Name loved the idea of papering over the crumbling architecture with silver. Even the windows were ultimately covered in foil, making the studio feel like a sparkling cave. The other part of the studio’s name comes from its previous occupant, a hat factory. While it was not named for Warhol’s style of production, the Factory did live up to its name—it was an industrial-scale center for art production, in which the artist and his assistants could be working on a number of different silkscreens, photographs, sculptures, and films simultaneously. Warhol would later move the Factory several times across Manhattan.

As a gay man in mid-century America, Warhol’s sexuality was a driving force in his life and art, but one that was largely neglected until recent years. Warhol was considered an effeminate child growing up, eschewing sports and other stereotypically boyish pastimes for drawing and other pursuits considered more feminine. Somewhat isolated from his peers in high school, the arts were also a refuge. As soon as he moved to New York, he immersed himself in the gay community there.


Especially in his younger years, to be an openly gay man in Pittsburgh or even New York was potentially dangerous, putting oneself at risk of assault or police harassment. While Warhol never quite came out fully to the general public, he always performed a certain queerness in his public persona. Warhol’s camp sensibility also served him well in his professional life. His commercial work was praised for its unabashedly feminine styling, while his Pop work could be considered a rejection of Abstract Expressionism’s toxic machismo.

Contrary to popular belief, Warhol had many relationships throughout his life, and the Factory was always populated with pretty young men the artist fancied. These gay kinships were artistically fruitful as well: many of Warhol’s collaborators came from the queer community, from the managers who employed him to create for window displays in the 1940s and 50s to many LGBT actors in his films. Perhaps his most famous film, Sleep, was directly inspired by his boyfriend, John Giorno. Giorno was an alcoholic, while Warhol was a frequent user of amphetamines. While Warhol would be up all night working, Giorno was often deep in a drunken slumber. Warhol took to watching him at night, and was fascinated by the viewing experience of this long, unbroken perspective on a human figure. Gay themes were also a consistent thread in his work, beginning with early erotic drawings and more public artworks that hinted at same-sex desire to films so salacious that his studio was once raided by the New York Police Department.

By the mid-1960s, as Warhol settled into a diverse filmic practice in his Silver Factory, the studio was increasingly populated by a diverse coterie of friends, actors, collaborators, and others who constituted the artist’s diverse entourage. The Superstars were Warhol’s in-house acting crew, starring in everything from narrative movies to experimental films. Apart from performing in his many artworks, the Superstars were also Warhol’s social entourage, accompanying him to his many events. Notably, acting talent was not an important qualification to be a Superstar. In fact, the title was somewhat ironic—acting in strange, experimental films was hardly a path to Hollywood fame, and most of the Superstars were minor celebrities at best. They were often oddballs and outcasts, drawn into Warhol’s circle and put on the screen because of their compelling eccentricities. It was also these eccentricities that resulted in to cliquish infighting, as Warhol’s actors competed for status as the premier star. Jane Holzer, also known as “Baby Jane,” is often considered the first Superstar, though she was quickly supplanted by perhaps the most famous of them, Edie Sedgwick. Indeed, due to the constant partying, psychological stress, and social infighting, Warhol cycled quickly through his Superstars, once commenting that he saw his actors as interchangeable. Notable Superstars include Taylor Mead, Ultra Violet, Ingrid Superstar, and Brigid Berlin, among many others. After Warhol was shot in 1968, he greatly reduced outside access to his studio, and the era of the Superstar gradually faded.

Though Warhol is often still known chiefly for his Pop paintings, he was, above all else, a multi-disciplinary artists, working in sculpture, film, photography, and, in an interesting mid-life twist, as a music producer. Warhol did not have any innate talent for music, despite his mother’s background in singing. Yet perhaps out of a desire to push his Pop aesthetic into as many realms as possible, by the mid-1960s Warhol was already thinking about how to incorporate a band into the Silver Factory. Warhol first saw the rock band the Velvet Underground play at the Café Bizarre in 1966. They were a notoriously dissonant group, with many audience members wondering whether they knew how to play their instruments at all. Warhol was immediately taken by their lo-fi aesthetic, making a deal to represent them the next day. In the coming years, Warhol would arrange concerts for them and produce their first album. The partnership did not last long, however. Warhol grew bored with the work, and the band felt they were being mismanaged. They parted ways with Warhol in June of 1967.

This was not the only collaboration Warhol undertook with musicians. Warhol was commissioned to design a number of album covers, including for Aretha Franklin, Diana Ross, Liza Minnelli, and John Lennon. Most famously, Mick Jagger of the Rolling Stones reached out to the artist in spring 1969 to commission him for the cover of their 1971 album Sticky Fingers. Warhol created a daring design: a photo of a man in jeans with a real zipper that could be unzipped. Finally, in 1984, around the time he was producing a television show for MTV, Warhol also directed the music video for “Hello Again” by the rock band The Cars.

After using painting installations as part of his window displays, Warhol began to parlay these themes and techniques into new, purely fine art Pop works. In the second half of 1961, the artist made a set of hand-drawn paintings of well-known characters, such as Superman, Popeye, and Batman. But this focus on comic book subjects did not last long, or at least not at first. Upon a visit to the legendary Leo Castelli Gallery, Warhol was introduced to the work of one of their newest artists, Roy Lichtenstein. Warhol was allegedly despondent that someone had gotten to comic book Pop Art before him. He went out in search of new subjects and modes of painting. One famous work from this moment is of a Coke bottle covered in drips and hatches, a deliberately rough, handmade style. After consulting with several friends and colleagues, however, Warhol decided to abandon this messy technique in favor of slick, polished images that would resemble advertisements. By the end of the year, Warhol had amassed a diverse portfolio of paintings that was drawing art aficionados to his studio on a regular basis. The next challenge was to find a gallery that might sell them. Though New York galleries refused to bite, Warhol met with the owners of Los Angeles’ Ferus Gallery in the fall, who were impressed by his Campbell’s Soup paintings. He was hesitant at first, but when the owners told him celebrities visit their gallery all the time, he was sold. (This was a lie.) The show would open in July 1962, Warhol’s first solo exhibition. Coincidentally, right before the show, Warhol made one of his most groundbreaking artworks. It was a canvas covered in two-hundred identical dollar bills, his first silkscreen.

Warhol once claimed that his interest in Campbell’s soup stemmed from his childhood, when his family ate it nearly every day. Recent research, however, suggests that this might have been Warhol embellishing his own biography. In the 1930s, canned soup was still considered a luxury item, and it is very unlikely that the working-class Warholas had such food regularly. By the 1960s, however, the soup was marketed as a middle-class meal, and with new forms of mass advertisement and television commercials, the product was ubiquitous. It became an icon, representing a simple experience that nearly every American could relate to. And this was exactly what drew Warhol to the brand. The story goes that Warhol was visited one day by a pair of friends. Warhol was depressed that Roy Lichtenstein had made a name for himself with paintings of comics, as that was exactly the kind of Pop art Warhol was doing. He begged his friends for a new idea. One suggested that the key was to find something that was recognizable to everyone, “something like Campbell’s Soup.” By the next day, Warhol’s home was stocked with every single variation of Campbell’s. The next year, when visited by a potential dealer, Warhol told him that the soup can paintings were portraits, a characteristic conflation of human subjects and commercial products. That spring, he painted 32 of the can paintings, one for each flavor the company produced.

In the summer of 1962, Warhol was busy preparing for his first solo show of Pop artworks in New York. While he was already working with Pop themes, such as comics and commercial products, this year brought his a notable shift in practice: the silkscreen. The silkscreen allowed Warhol to make glossy, dramatic images quickly and en masse, producing “clean, plastic images” as one assistant described them. Among other experiments, Warhol took a PR photo of the actress Liz Taylor’s head and enlarged onto a silkscreened canvas, transforming her into a commercial product like any of Warhol’s other icons. As far as we know, this was Warhol’s first silkscreen portrait.

But among the silkscreens in this New York show, one figure dominated: Marylin Monroe. More than half the paintings in the show were of her, and in one monumental pair of silkscreens her image appeared a hundred times. One other famous work was placed at the entrance, the first the viewer saw when they entered. It was a large, monochrome gold canvas, in the center of which was a tiny image of Monroe’s face, appearing like a religious icon. The source image for these paintings was a publicity still the actress took for her movie Niagara. Warhol’s choice of the subject was hardly unique—by the 1950s, many cultural practitioners had become fascinated with the cult of Marylin Monroe, and other Pop artists had explored the idea of Monroe as an icon in their works. Warhol’s interest, while certainly aesthetic, also had a personal resonance. The artist was a film fanatic, and Monroe’s tragic death in August of 1962 inspired him to make this set of silkscreens. Warhol later noted that this suite could also be considered one of his Death and Disaster works, a series of tragic images he made the following year.

Warhol was religious throughout his life, though ambiguously so. He was raised Byzantine Catholic, a small community whose religious practices and ceremonies differ strongly from the Roman Catholicism more common among the Pittsburgh immigrant community at the time. Perhaps a larger influence than the religion itself was this sense of difference with his peers. Warhol seems to have been a churchgoer for most of his life, but irregularly. Some accounts report that he almost never attended services in the 1950s and 1960s, but after he was nearly murdered in 1968, he experienced a form of religious revival. But his connection to his faith was as eccentric as many other aspects of his life. He would frequently attend church on Sundays, but typically only stay for five or ten minutes. He often seemed more interested in the aesthetics of the architecture and the pageantry of the liturgy. While he held some belief in the rites of the church, he would often give ambiguous answers as to whether he considered himself religious or even believed in God. And of course, his hard-partying lifestyle and transgressive art would be difficult to square with a devout believer. Warhol’s religious faith was further complicated by a belief in a wide range of superstitions and new age spirituality, such using crystals to heal illnesses. Though Warhol’s relationship to Christianity remains debatable, many have read the influence of religion in his artworks. One early Marilyn Monroe silkscreen, of a tiny image set against a field of gold, seems to recall Byzantine icons. Later in life, after his attempted murder, many of his works took a darker or more spiritual turn, often directly exploring themes of death and the sublime.

Warhol first met Valerie Solanas in 1965. At the time, she was living on the streets of Greenwich Village. She was known to be brilliant but deeply eccentric, a mix of traits that made her fit right in with the rest of Warhol’s circle. She was the founder and only member of the radical misandrist organization the Society for Cutting Up Men, or S.C.U.M., which advocated for eliminating all men from the world. She and Warhol were not especially close, though for a period they socialized and worked together amicably. In her first visit to the studio, Solanas gave him a copy of her play Up Your Ass, which the artist enjoyed, and he later cast her in his movie I, a Man. Things quickly took a dark turn, however. Solanas suffered from mental illness, and by 1968 she was having deeply paranoid delusions. She accused Warhol, who had lost his copy of the script she gave him, of conspiring to steal her play, and she sent him a series of increasingly venomous letters. The situation culminated in June 1968, when she brought a gun to Warhol’s studio and shot him at point-blank range in the chest. The bullet collapsed his lung and wreaked havoc on his organs. He very nearly died on the operating table, and he would have health complications for the remainder of his life. Warhol was also traumatized by the shooting, tightening access to his studio and by many accounts becoming far more removed and anxious.

In the 1980s, Warhol’s health was in decline. Many people commented on his unnatural thinness and sickly pallor. Since 1973, he had had persistent issues with gallstones, occasionally flaring up in episodes of intense pain. More than a decade later, this pain was nearly constant. Having a lifelong fear of hospitals, Warhol adamantly denied treatment, instead relying on crystal healing as a way to treat this and many other chronic conditions. Yet by the mid-1980s, the problem was growing impossible to ignore. When Warhol’s dermatologist insisted he get tested after hearing about this chronic pain, the artist saw a series of doctors. With their strong urging, they convinced Warhol that the gallbladder inflammation was so serious that without immediate removal, he may die. Warhol finally acquiesced, checking himself into the hospital for what is typically a routine, safe procedure. The surgery went well, despite complications due to years of allowing the damaged organ to deteriorate. Warhol awoke from surgery looking healthy, but this initial prognosis was misleading. He died in the middle of that night, his body crashing from the surgery and from decades of stress to his body—essentially due to the small risk that any major surgery carries. Warhol died on February 22, 1987. Days later, a small funeral was held in a Byzantine Catholic church in Pittsburgh with family and a few close friends from New York. In April, a star-studded memorial was held in St. Patrick’s Roman Catholic Cathedral in Manhattan, with more than three thousand people in attendance.

In his will, Warhol donated the vast majority of his prodigious estate to a new foundation to be established for the advancement of the arts, what came to be The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. Though the Foundation sold a number of the artist’s personal effects soon after, they retained a large amount of Warhol’s unsold pieces. Many of the best of these works were used to found The Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh. The Museum also came to house the artist’s archives and his expansive Time Capsules, 610 boxes of random studio detritus that, in a distinctly Warholian gesture, he later declared to be artworks unto themselves.

The Andy Warhol Museum is one of the four Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh. It is a collaborative project between the Dia Art Foundation, The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, and the Carnegie Institute, where the young artist received so much of his aesthetic education. First announced in 1989, the Museum opened its doors in May of 1994. Today, the Andy Warhol Museum holds the largest collection of Warhol’s artworks and archival materials in the world, spanning the entirety of his life and career. They are also the largest single-artist museum in North America. They are the source of all of the works in “Becoming Andy Warhol.”